A central issue in research on speech production is whether or not the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon is a competitive process. An important experimental paradigm to study the dynamics of lexical retrieval is the blocked naming paradigm, in which participants name pictures of objects that are grouped by semantic category (‘homogenous’ or ‘related’ blocks) or not grouped by semantic category (‘heterogeneous’ or ‘unrelated’ blocks). Typically, pictures are repeated multiple times (or cycles) within both related and unrelated blocks. It is known that participants are slower in related than in unrelated blocks when the data are collapsed over all within-block repetitions. This semantic interference effect, as observed in the blocked naming task, is the strongest empirical evidence for the hypothesis of lexical selection by competition. Here we show, contrary to the accepted view, that the default polarity of semantic context effects in the blocked naming paradigm is facilitation, rather than interference. In a series of experiments we find that interference arises only when items repeat within a block, and only because of that repetition: What looks to be ‘semantic interference’ in the blocked naming paradigm is actually less repetition priming in related compared to unrelated blocks. These data undermine the theory of lexical selection by competition and indicate a model in which the most highly activated word is retrieved, regardless of the activation levels of nontarget words. We conclude that the theory of lexical selection by competition, and by extension the important psycholinguistic models based on that assumption, are no longer viable, and frame a new way to approach the question of how words are retrieved in spoken language production.

中文翻译：

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词法选择不是通过竞争：来自阻塞命名范式的证据

语音生成研究的一个核心问题是从心理词典中检索单词是否是一个竞争过程。研究词汇检索动态的一个重要实验范式是块命名范式，其中参与者命名按语义类别（“同质”或“相关”块）分组或未按语义类别分组（“异类”）的对象图片或“无关”块）。通常，图片在相关块和不相关块内重复多次（或循环）。众所周知，当数据在所有块内重复中折叠时，参与者在相关块中比在不相关块中慢。正如在阻塞命名任务中观察到的那样，这种语义干扰效应是竞争词汇选择假设的最有力的经验证据。在这里，我们表明，与公认的观点相反，阻塞命名范式中语义上下文效应的默认极性是促进，而不是干扰。在一系列实验中，我们发现只有当项目在一个块内重复时才会出现干扰，并且仅仅因为这种重复：在块命名范式中看起来是“语义干扰”的实际上是与不相关块相比，相关块中的重复启动更少。这些数据破坏了通过竞争进行词汇选择的理论，并表明了一个模型，在这个模型中，无论非目标词的激活水平如何，都会检索到最高激活的词。我们得出结论，竞争词汇选择理论以及基于该假设的重要心理语言学模型不再可行，